Adam Reid, M.S., receives Graduate Student Mentoring Award

The I-Cubed Graduate Student Mentoring Award has been established to recognize graduate students at the University of Florida (UF) who take time to help others succeed as graduate or undergraduate students or in K-12 classrooms (i.e., working with K-12 students and/or teachers). The award is particularly designed to acknowledge the mentoring contribution from the graduate students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines, including SBE (Social, Behavioral and Economic) sciences.

The award committee reviewed more than 65 applications from graduate students around UF. The award committee was pleasantly surprised that the majority of applications were highly competitive and depicted the outstanding mentoring efforts of UF’s graduate students. Adam Reid was selected among 6 other students to receive this award. The official award ceremony will take place on October 29th at 4:20 PM in the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom during the 2013 Graduate Student Research Day.

Adam’s winning personal statement described his progressive cascading model of mentoring, which he developed in collaboration with Amanda Balkhi, M.S. and under the mentorship of Drs. Joseph McNamara and Gary Geffken. The principle of this mentoring model is expanding responsibilities based off displayed competency and experience acquired (i.e., progressing responsibilities) paired with simultaneous downward peer-to-peer supervision (i.e., cascading mentoring). He values this mentoring model because it continues to promote growth in the undergraduates he mentors while also teaching them the importance and value in using their acquired knowledge to mentor younger peers. He strongly believes both receiving and providing mentoring is imperative to the maturation of a student.

This model allows the large lab of 40 undergraduates Adam codirects to operate efficiently while still promoting the individual growth of each student. In the past three years, this lab has produced five students who were accepted into the University Scholars Program, two students in the Junior Medical Honors Program, three students in the McNair Scholars Program, eight students who have coauthored a manuscript in a peer reviewed journal (often their senior thesis) and 15 students who have presented data at a local, national, or international conference. Adam is currently working with Amanda and Drs. McNamara and Geffken to publish this mentoring model in a peer reviewed journal and they recently presented this model, applied to the mentoring they conduct with therapists being trained at the Department of Psychiatry’s UF OCD Program, at the 2013 International OCD Foundation annual conference in Atlanta.